The television and radio industries, as well as commercial advertisers, have an obvious interest in knowing the number of people watching or listening to particular stations and programs at a particular time. Existing audience monitoring and rating systems are based on connecting extra meters to TV sets and radios, however, even when using the Digital Encoding technology (DEC).
Another fundamental problem with the current technology and processes is the audience sampling size. For example, the leading company in audience rating for over forty years, Neilsen Media Research, Inc. can only sample about 5,000 households and 13,000 people in selected regions around world. In addition to the small sampling size, their technology requires manual operations from the persons involved in the study.
Due to the difficulties with present techniques, a need exists for techniques to obtain audience data directly and automatically from the software and devices used to provide broadband network service, such as in a real-time manner. This need is preferably addressed without extra monitoring devices or manual operations from subscribers or viewers.